An hour's soak for a whole side and a couple of hours drying in a fan oven on defrost and it has come out very well. A day or two in the fridge to let it set and let the salt even out and it will be perfect. This has saved me two sides of salmon.

The video from Formans is very interesting. I use very coarse sea salt I bring back from France in 10kg bags. I usually pack the salmon in it for a couple of hours. But I did some very wet trout a month ago and it failed to dry out and ruined. I probably need to be more careful with the amount of salt and % weight loss.

The coarse salt is probably better suited to bacon than salmon, as Forman's seem to use much finer salt and a good deal less of it.

Part of my difficulty is finding a good sources for good bulk salt in England. I have heard pure dried vacuum salt is good but have not had a lot of success finding it.

I haven't tried curing salmon yet, but I've been poking around here and elsewhere for guidance. I've seen some recipes that state they add sugar to the salt for the cure, in part, to cut the saltiness. I've also seen some recipes that call for a wet brine, followed by a freshening, which is apparently a rinse and/or soak in fresh water without salt, to get the saltiness of the finished product down. I don't know if this would apply to a dry cure. My reading led me to the discovery that lox, at least in the US, is supposed to be cured, not smoked, and is considerably saltier than other popular smoked salmon products that are often known incorrectly as lox.

Most of the recipes I'v been seeing call for long curing time in the salt, and I have yet to run across one that was only a few hours. It's all quite confusing, but the one thing I read that may help is the combining of salt and sugar in the cure.

This may not be quite legit but when I was a kid we'd do a couple hundred pounds of chum salmon in a smoker we'd build up like a tent for a couple days. We'd always use coarse salt in a wet brine -- for some reason it seemed to be more gentle in its flavour -- then we'd boil the fish before we ate it.

Now I try to balance the salt with the sugar and a little soya sauce. Not quite as hardcore but it's not as shocking to the palate as pure salt.